On the Edge
by Nekare
Summary: Hannah Abbott comes home to a funeral. She wants to be strong, but she can't help but want to escape everything. [oneshot, HBP spoilers]


Based on the most amazing h4yleyg's 20 Random Facts About Hannah Abbot. (www. livejournal. com/users /h4yleyg /75709.html just remove the spaces.) I loved writing this, even when it got too long and difficult by the middle of it; but hey, I had something to while I was meant to pay attention to the teacher. Reviews will be loved!

**On the Edge**

**By: Nekare**

The train is deserted; the ghost of laughter doesn't reach Hannah's ears as it should, but instead the silence shrouds her as she gazes out of the window, watching the endless green fields without really looking at them. The only reason she's here and not already home via floo, is the special favor she asked to Professor Sprout, and as she sits there alone but with the last letter she couldn't owl to her mother, she wonders if she made the right choice.

Then she thinks of the black-clad people that await her at home, crowding round her mother coffin with grave faces and empty words. Then she knows she prefers being alone.

The witch with the food trolley passes by, and practically forces Hannah to eat at least a cauldron cake, "On me," she says softly, "Because sugar will always lift your mood." The ageless lady looks at her sweetly, probably having heard of the murder of Louisa Abbott, the first apologetic look anyone has given Hannah since she was told the news (Professor Sprout's eyes were too filled with terror to be completely compassionate). Hannah feels tears stinging her eyes and decides to humor her.

She buys two chocolate frogs, and the cards are left forgotten on the seat beside her.

* * *

The Leaky Cauldron is as gloomy and dark as ever when Hannah enters the pub flushed from the cold London winds and with the long yellow and black Hufflepuff scarf wound tightly around her neck. She had spent an hour laying upon a moist bench in a park near King's Cross, trying to delay the inevitable.

Tom is cleaning glasses behind the bar, humming to himself in the empty place. He stops as soon as he sees her, and then he's awkward and sputtering "Hello," he says while avoiding looking her in the eye. Hannah mutters a quiet Hi, and moves to the fireplace, her hand hesitating just an inch above the floo powder.

"Miss Abbott," Tom stops her, and when she turns she can see a glass over the bar, filled to the top with amber-colored liquor, firewhiskey by the looks of it. She walks three steps and grabs the glass, downing it quickly with a grimace, alcohol swimming in her blood mainstream and tickling her brain cells to wake up (and she wishes it would just kill them and be done already. Then she wouldn't have to_ feel _). Hannah puts the glass back, making a bit of noise on purpose just to break the eerie silence of the pub once filled with eccentric witches and wizards talking loud and animatedly.

"Thanks Tom."

"You're welcome," He answers with a little smile that still shows his missing teeth. "Good luck."

She nods and walks back to the fireplace, the flames marking the dark bags under her eyes. She grabs a handful of dust, and can't help but think about her mother.

_Ashes to ashes._

She puts her hand beside her mouth and blows, watching the fire turn emerald as the powder falls as snowflakes to the soot filled hearth. She steps into it, says her destination while swallowing the shaky tone in her voice, and she spins (as her mother used to spin her around when she was three and free to laugh and not worry about this stupid war that has dragged on for too long), spins (as she spun with Justin on the Yule Ball, hands linked together and twin smiles on their faces), spins (as her world has just spun more than she can handle right now), and then she's home.

* * *

The house is almost as crowded as she had imagined, silent people she doesn't know moving about her home looking as lost as she feels. Her grandmother hugs her as soon as she's out of the fire, red rimmed eyes and shaky sobs sounding deafening to her ears. She hugs back for a minute before she pulls back and asks in a whisper, "Dad?"

Her grandmother wipes her eyes with the back of her hand and takes Hannah's with the other, leading her to where Hannah's father is sitting against the wall in an austere chair, lips trembling. Hannah lets go of her grandmother's hand and walks slowly towards her father. She puts a hand on his shoulder and he flinches, his eyes filling with fear until he realizes who she is.

Hannah holds him without a word, her eyes closed tightly to hold the tears back, and her father, her hero as a child, the one she suspects to have had ties with the Death Eaters once ago; trembles in her arms, sobbing into her neck not caring who may be watching.

She'll have bruises tomorrow, but she holds back just as tightly, fighting against the tears that she just can't allow to fall down her face.

* * *

The way Hannah kept stalling to get home made her miss the service, and she's grateful of that. Instead, she's lead to the living room, where her mother lies in a mahogany coffin, pale blue satin matching with her coloring and her never to be opened again eyes; the same Hannah sees every morning in the mirror. She stops at the door a little while, the hand of her youngest cousin, Laura, trapped tightly inside her own, taking strength from the five year old that can't seem to stop crying and whispering sweet nothings to Hannah, the most encouraging act anyone's given her this day, surprisingly.

Hannah bites her lip and enters the room, her aunt calling Laura away to give her a moment of privacy. She walks slowly to her mother, trying (failing) to swallow the feeling of emptiness that has plagued her the entire day. The night is falling, and the sunset colors filter through the window in a mockery of happy times long past and all of those afternoons in summer talking in the porch with her muggle-born mum about the films she missed while in Hogwarts and of that tingle inducing boy that Justin has become, eating sweet watermelon and laughing together; ending forever since now.

"Hullo, mum," She whispers as she stands next to the open coffin. "I'm home now."

She grabs one of the chairs for the mourners (such a hard word, she thinks, filled with sadness and thick with despair) and sets it right beside her mother, who looks ghostly pale and unmarked, as in an eternal sleep. Someone combed her hair but did it wrong, and Hannah frowns slightly as she moves one stray lock of hair to the other side of her face, fingertips lingering on the cold skin. A sigh leaves her lips (she tries to convince herself that it isn't a sob), and she sits, gazing at her dead mother as if to memorize every detail of it.

A while passes, and the people walk back into the room, filling it with whispered praises (no one would dare to speak ill of the dead) and some truthful condolences, others not as much. People talk to her and move right next to her, but Hannah pays no mind as she keeps on staring and daydreaming of a brighter future and damning with all her will the sociopaths that can watch families be destroyed with such contempt in their eyes. She sits there and doesn't cry, because she remembers that nice boy Harry Potter and all of his teachings in the DA last year, worth naught in the end but a warning after all of what was to come. She had paid no heed then (when she was young and bright and now she feels as if she's aged a thousand days in one), but the war is still raging outside her grief and she must be brave to help put an end to it.

Now it's personal, after all.

People come and go, but Hannah refuses to move from beside her mother until midnight comes and her father has to drag her up to her own room, after she had fallen asleep with her head resting against the cool wood of her mother's last resting place.

She didn't have nightmares that night. She dreamt of revenge instead.

* * *

The last person left the house two hours after the funeral, the next day, and Hannah and his father are left alone to eat in silence, still dressed in black and eyes somber; food tasting like nothing but the handful of earth both of them threw on top of the casket, in the too cold, too windy, too _wrong_ cemetery.

The sun hasn't gone down yet, but Hannah feels tired and drained as she walks around the hose ghostly, without a purpose and feeling as if she could pass right through the walls, the Grey Lady of ashen face and the wrong house.

Owls arrive just before sunset, hooting loudly in the too silent house and demanding for food; leaving three letters in their wake. Hannah sits next to the desk in her room, staring at the letters as if they could bite her, dreading the inside.

She now regrets not having spoken to anyone after she had been told the news in Herbology (ironically, her favorite class), she regrets having stormed off to the train with no second glances and wishes she had hugged Justin for reassurance, let Susan take her hand and have the weight of Ernie's hand on her shoulder; let them share the grief. But she knows this is her burden and she has to go through it by herself and let her friends enjoy the volatile happiness that never seems to last these days.

Ten minutes later, a long sigh comes out from her lips, and she opens the first letter, Susan's, with quivering lips. The parchment is wet with tears, and the message make's Hannah's heart to skip a beat. Her eyes roam the lines of the tiny handwrite of her best friend, and as soon as she finishes she drops it on the desk, ripping open Ernie's letter with wide eyes. She gasps as she finishes that one too, and Justin's is read with shaky hands. The message is the same in the three letters, worded differently but with the same meaning.

_You're not alone. You shouldn't go through this by yourself._

A sob tears through her body, and she realizes then she had been trying to escape, to be proud and unfeeling so as to not break down completely at her mother's death; and now it seems so useless and stupid because her mother is not coming back, but that doesn't mean she has to suffer in silence (in the way everyone is suffering nowadays, breathing with fear at the next death).

The tears start flowing on their own, and then she's crying on earnest, choking on her sobs with her eyes red and blotchy. She cries herself to sleep that night, clutching the letters tightly to her chest and wishing it could all be a sick nightmare, a nasty trick of her imagination. She cries, and the last coherent thought she has belongs to all of the people she loves, people she'd mourn if they were to suffer the same fate as her mother. Then comes sleep, and thankfully, no dreams.

* * *

She passes the next morning in bed, staring at the ceiling and trying desperately not to think of the smell of waffles that should come from downstairs but doesn't, and the way his father looks out of the window mildly absently over his coffee when she goes down at last, chased by the hunger she doesn't think she should feel. hungriness is _i normal /i _, and it's strange to think she still feeds and takes baths and gets bored in a world in which her mother no longer exists.

She reads the letters over and over again as the day passes on, and a couple of hours before sunset she finally leaves them over her desk, rumpled and a bit folded from when she gripped them too hard last night; and goes up the old stair in the attic to the roof.

She sits there for a while, looking at the green hills of nothingness that surround her home, the town standing with it's children playing at her back. The silence hums in her ear, whispering and calling her, music on the wind.

Hannah stands up, her lose cloak whipping behind her as the strong wind pushes against her, making her cheeks and nose grow red with the cold, her eyes tearing up. She keeps them open, though, and she gives a step towards the end of the roof, the sudden ending of the small world that is the top of the house she grew up in, playing and studying and laughing and loving. Now everything's over, and she takes another step forward.

Fair locks of hair fly everywhere, carried by the translucent colored winds and defying gravity as if they wanted to be freed of anything and nothing, Hannah's lips move unconsciously and form the words for the old lullaby she's not entirely conscious she remembers; eyes fixed on the horizon. Another step, and she thinks briefly of the letters she left in her room and the faces of fellow Hufflepuffs she's longing to see. An image of her mother laughing at the frog her little girl just charmed to have a crown after she had kissed it overcomes the shaky years of continuous fear in Hogwarts (she has loved it, yes, but it isn't home in the way you lay on the dew moist grass and play tag with your family); and her feet move on their own.

She's at the end of the roof now (that word, _ending_ , closure, what she'll never get and craves so much for), and she gazes at the ground with her scarf billowing in the air, painting yellow and black the cloudy grey day, but she doesn't notice as her eyes look dazed and distant, transfixed with the idea of peace.

A voice cuts to the thick mist that's formed on her brain, some awareness of where she is comes slowly. "Hannah! Dinner time," Says his father from the trapdoor that leads to the attic, lifting the door barely an inch but not actually looking out, knowing his daughter's refuge.

Hannah turns her head languidly, staring over her shoulder with hair tangled in her face and lips parted in confusion; the voice of his father coming distorted as if he was underwater, and the words getting tangled together on her head. Her gaze turns back to the just watered lawn three stories beneath her feet, and her mind takes the letters from her father's calling and forms one word on its own: _Stop._

Her eyes open wide when she realizes what she was about to do, gasping for air that seems to have deserted her to go frolic with the wind that still feels sharp against her frame. She goes backwards quickly, horror filling her eyes as she stops by the trapdoor with panting breaths, tears stinging once again. She fumbles with the door, and when she's finally on the stair she almost tumbles down.

The room is dusty and the air is stale in the attic, but she pays no mind as she sits on the floor with her hands braced at both sides of her body, looking ahead and shaking softly. Harry Potter comes to her mind again, and she suddenly feels ashamed of herself, of wanting to escape the duty that comes along with being on his side; of being strong and capable of fighting, something she had sworn to herself she would do when the time came, a long time ago.

"Hannah, do hurry up, dinner-" Footsteps create echoes in the room, and then her father is there, gazing at her worryingly. "Are you okay?" He asks, probably wondering about her too pale face and rumpled hair, the tears in her eyes.

"Yes, I-" She stops at mid sentence, and decides to be honest. "No."

Her father kneels beside her, and when their eyes meet Hannah can see the same loss reflected on them. "But I will be," she says meaning it, and hugs her father. She has a war to fight, after all, and she will not let herself fall anymore.

She's better than that.

* * *

The next day, Justin receives an Owl from Hannah. He stares at the curved handwriting for a minute before opening, black bags under his eyes and the entire Hufflepuff table looking at him discretely. The content of the letter takes his breath away, and he follows the blue ink with his index, trying to assure himself that it is, in fact, real.

_Life is too short._

_I love you._

_Hannah. _


End file.
